Research Guides: Shakespeare: General Criticism

General Criticism

Shakespearean Criticism.
Edited by Laurie Lanzen Harris.
Detroit: Gale, 1984 – present.
Shakespearean Criticism, a subset of Gale Literature Criticism, provides immediate access to lengthy critical essays by major critics. Arranged alphabetically, the entries provide in-depth critical essays on an author’s work, along with biographical facts, a list of major works, and related sources. Usually, the essays give an overview of a writer’s work or themes. The entries are substantial. You can search by Named Work (Hamlet), or Keyword (e.g. Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, themes like ambition or pride, and critics like T.S. Eliot).
Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism
ISBN: 1350093246
Edited by Evelyn Gajowski.
London: Arden Shakespeare, 2020.
Literature Online.
This vast online library lets you access more than 350,000 full-text works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, as well as biographies, bibliographies and secondary sources. The interface is the same as the ABELL article database, and once in Literature Online you can use both resources, the library and the article database. To find Shakespeare-related criticism, select criticism on the left, and then enter shakespeare william in the search box.
The Shakespeare Collection.
Gale Thomson Corporation, 2006.
Start here for plays, poems, criticism, and context. Besides the complete full-text and fully-searchable Arden Shakespeare (comprising texts, notes, introductions and commentaries), this collection includes primary sources, historical editions, contemporary criticism, textual history, critical reception, performance history, and the historical and cultural context in which Shakespeare wrote his work. You can also compare texts on screen line by line, scene by scene, by using the compare texts option.
Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet.
Not only does this site provide you with links to several full-text online versions of Shakespeare’s works, but Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet contains links to many full-text articles, both critical (by such critics as Frank Kermode and William Hazlitt) and descriptive (on such topics as Shakespeare’s “Life and Times”).
Shakespeare, William (Bartleby).
Besides containing the full text of the Oxford Shakespeare online—both plays and poems—this Bartleby site includes full-text criticism on Shakespeare by such writers as T.S. Eliot, George Saintsbury and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Moreover, it provides a link to a full-text Shakespeare biography in the Columbia Encyclopedia.

Research Guides

Shakespeare

General Criticism

Library links

Libraries

Contact

Connect with us